I've been hovering around Targets, waiting to see if the Man of Steel LEGO sets are cheaper there than they were at Toys"R"Us, where all that stuff first appeared.  SPOILERS: Yes, they are!  This set with Superman, Zod, and Lois Lane was $25 at TRU, but only $20 at Target.  Scooore!

I bought it only for Lois.  There's something about a mini-figure in a sweater vest that's inescapably alluring.   Seriously, major crush forming here.

(As an aside, it's funny to me that Man of Steel Superman's hairpiece is the usual LEGO Superman hairpiece, with the swooshy S-curl hanging over his forehead, because why tool him a new one, even though MoS Superman ain't got that.  Supermans is Supermans.)

I have no idea what the set itself is supposed to represent.  There's this folding thing, and a sliding door, and a ladder, and there's some missiles.  Sure?  Why not?  And then there's some egg-shaped space pod thing with a seat and a canopy and stuff.  No idea what that is, either.

...I've decided it's one of those sex hotel rooms you pay for by the hour.

("He ends most of his speeches that way.")

Hey, everyone, let me introduce you to The Perfect Springer.  And, no, actually, it's not because he's a Triple Changer again for the first time in forever.  I mean, that's nice.  I like that.  It's cool.  But what makes him the super best is that he takes the bulk of his visuals from Nick Roche's Springer redesign for Last Stand of the Wreckers -- which, you know, is an awesome story, because I keep telling you that it is.

I would have been happyish with a based-on-the-old-cartoon Triple Changer Springer.  But Last Stand of the Wreckers Springer?  That gets me instantly to climax.  It is Boner City over here.  In four hours I'm gonna have to call a doctor.

Admittedly, this particular rendition of LSOTW Springer is taller and thinner than how he was rendered in the story itself.  He was a wide mass of dude in that thing.  This toy is thinner than that, though still, you know, not being a stick.  It's probably one of those sacrifices you gotta make because of physics, as this guy has two altmodes to transform into, and if you bulk up his legs you kind of end up with a fat car and helicopter.  His proportions do resemble more Roche's original control art, versus Springer's actual appearances.

There are some other changes to the design for this toy, but they're ones I'm satisfied with.  Mostly, it's that his altmodes look less made-up vehicle-y by a smidge.  Springer's new car mode looks a lot more like a car versus a four-wheeled vehicle of some undetermined sort.

Let me tangent here: Man, what the hell was with original 1986 Springer's toy, anyway?  I'm not sure that thing is a real Triple Changer.  It has a robot mode and it has an okayish helicopter mode, but his car mode is just the midtransformation step with the propeller removed.  It barely pretends to have rear wheels.  What an awful thing.  And how awesome is it that this new toy has three distinct modes that are all great?  I mean, even the shape of the windshield changes.  Looking at either vehicle mode, you couldn't tell at a glance that it has a second one.

Springer doesn't have any engineering hurdles like Blitzwing's shoulders.  He's, as I've been saying, pretty damn perfect.  The only part of the transformation that gave me pause was how to attach the gun under the cockpit in helicopter mode.  The instructions just give you an arrow and the words "ATTACH WEAPON."  Well, yeah, great, but HOW?  Apparently there are some... notches?  I just kind of use excessive force and some shapes that look like they complement each other eventually snap together.

The propeller spins very satisfactorily.  And it transforms into a believable sword seamlessly.  It's not that giant plank of wood on a peg the original toy had.  I'm impressed at the amount of articulation he has, too, despite the engineering demands.  He has a turning waist and even though his hands bury inside his own forearms while transformed, he still has articulated wrists.   Voyager Class is also the perfect size for a Springer -- dude was larger than everyone else in the cartoon (he was Optimus Prime/Rodimus Prime's height), and in the comic he wasn't no shrimp.   So he'll look right next to a Deluxe Hot Rod, Kup, or Blurr.

you will buy this

you will buy this now

I suppose it was inevitable that we'd get a toy of the last of the three original Decepticon Triple Changers.  We got Astrotrain in 2006 and Tankor (Octane) in ... 2008? and here we are in 2013 with Blitzwing!   I am a little surprised he turned out to be a Voyager and not a Deluxe like the other two.  Not that this is a bad thing -- lord knows Triple Changers are kind of a huge engineering challenge, so giving yourself more meat to work with seems like a smart idea.  Though it does mean he kind of stands out next to his dinky pals, and if I had to pick one of the three to be the Giant One, I'd always pick Astrotrain.  He's the guy that carries everyone else around, after all.

However, he goes pretty well with RTS Lugnut, and I think I care about that more.

This Blitzwing even has the same face-changey gimmick as the Animated Blitzwing.  (2008's Animated Blitzwing is likely why it took from 2008 to 2013 to get a "Classics" Blitzwing.  They're both Voyagers who are Blitzwing in Blitzwing colors who also Triple Change into a tank and a jet.  He is kind of redundant to this guy on many levels.)  I'm happy to see stuff from Animated stuffed into G1, rather than the other way around as it tended to.  And it's not like Blitzwing loses anything by gaining this gimmick, mostly because there wasn't much to him to begin with.

This toy really makes use of the complexity of the size class.  He's huge and full of hinges.  This density of joints is absolutely fine except for at his shoulders.  They just don't peg together well, and so if you try to rotate his shoulders around, his chest comes apart.  This is annoying and stupid.  There is a way to fix it that involves unscrewing the front and back halves of his torso and sanding down the connection points so that everything's smashed together tighter in robot mode, but it sucks that you gotta do it.  I attempted  it, and it fixes it a little, but I think I need another pass or something.   If this weren't a thing, there'd be little to complain about.

But yeah, he's pretty damn complex.  Sure, you'd expect him to have wings that fold out, but he's also got little extra wing contours that also fold out to create a more full and natural wing shape.  His jet cockpit opens.  His tank turret rotates.  Additional treads fold out from inside his legs.  Tank mode skin folds out from inside his crotch to fill in the front.

His knees are a little high on his legs, though.  It results in some awkward posing.  It's somewhat understandable, given he's got treads in his shins, but still it's a thing.

It's kind of amazing how distinct you can make the vehicle modes of a Triple Changer when given all this extra mass to work with.  There's even a surplus of pegs and tabs to keep everything where it needs to be in every mode.  He's... comprehensive.  Other than those friggin' shoulders, this guy's pretty amazing.

I mean, he's no Springer, but who is, really.

I was surprised at the number of vendors selling Transformers at Calgary Expo.  It was a sizable representation!   Quite a few booths were Transformers-only.

For example, there was this booth at the back of the hall, and, huh, they had mint carded 1984 Frenzy/Laserbeak and Rumble/Ravage sets for like $20 and, weird, is that a boxed Sunstreaker for $40?  ...oh.  Right.  I see.  Counterfeit.  Just buttloads of counterfeit Transformers.  You'd only know because they weren't hundreds of dollars.  (Well, there are really slight ways to tell from examining the specifics of the packaging, like if something or another is a millimeter to the left, but that is not knowledge I possess.)  Thought that was kinda skeevy.  The guy who was selling them referred to them as "reprints."  I suppose that's a euphemism.

But actual Transformers that were real Transformers made by real Transformers factories weren't badly priced, either!  Like the Axalon here.  I think when he came out he was like $50 to import.  He's just a deluxe, but he's "limited run" or something, and TakaraTomy needed the dough I guess and so they cranked up the prices for this leg of United stuff.  But a booth at Calgary Expo had him for $30!  Canadian!  That's like $25 American.  So I scooped up the heck outta that.

And then Air Canada lost my luggage on the way home (nearly getting me stranded in Toronto since you can't go through customs if your luggage ain't security-cleared) and it took a few days for me to get him home.

BUT WHO IS HE?

He's, uh, the Axalon.  The Maximal ship from Beast Wars.  As a robot.  Look, okay, Takara released the Deluxe Class bug-machine-tank-thinger Unicron as "Ark Unicron," aka "The Autobot Ship Is Possessed By Unicron Or Something" and so the story is that Primus made the Axalon be alive too in order to fight him.  Crazy, right?  It's the kind of crazy I'd buy for $25 but not $50.

And, look, yes, I know, he has an Autobot symbol on him despite being a Maximal ship, and yes, I know that his toy was designed to be the Nemesis, an entirely different ship which was also around at the time so why is it the Axalon, but...

Yeah.

Crazy.

It seems like Hasbro's trying to shove Ultra Magnus into their own cartoon programming through sheer force of action figure market saturation.  We got the Cyberverse Ultra Magnus, then the Voyager Class Ultra Magnus, both based on the same design, followed by a Fall of Cybertron Ultra Magnus, and... okay, two more Ultra Magnuses?  Oh, and these are actually based on the design from the cartoon?  All right, then.

Seems like the way to get ol' Mags into the cartoon was to make him a partial rebuild of Optimus Prime's model.  Likewise, that's how this Beast Hunters toy works.  It's a retool of the "Robots in Disguise" Voyager from last year, which is a toy I didn't own, so it was new to me, at least.  And unlike the First Edition Optimus Prime I did own, this version tried to get stuff to transform into what it actually transforms into, rather than having a bunch of fake kibble.  The chest windows become the real windows (such as they are), the air foil shoulders become the real air foils... that sort of thing.  Though for some reason the toy doesn't get to keep the smokestacks.  They're in the instructions, but not included with the released toy.

Also, because Ultra Magnus has new gigantic shoulders, Ultra Magnus's truck mode has new gigantic Ultra Magnus shoulders sticking out the back of the cab.  In robot mode, they can point forward and launch missiles.  The missiles can store all sorts of places.  There's clips everywhere.

Weirdly, Ultra Magnus's retool seems to be based on the Japanese "Arms Micron" iteration, as it's got the Mini-Con peghole attachments still there on his forearms.  Maybe it's not really THAT weird, if TakaraTomy permanently altered the tooling to put those in.

Oh, and Magnus comes with a winged jetpack!  It seems to be the same design that Beast Hunters Optimus Prime has, with the X-shaped wings and the metal shard tail.  It clips up over the back of Maggy's shoulders behind his head, and it's amazingly snug.  You kind of have to overreach the whole mechanism to get it to fit in.  In truck mode, it just pegs into the hitch and you set the Forge of Solus on there.

(Yeah, he comes with a tiny Forge of Solus.  Because Magnuses these days have hammers, and so I guess any hammer will do?)

It was hard to choose between this Magnus and the upcoming Premium Edition Magnus.  Premium Magnus comes with a much better Forge of Solus, plus my mental image of Ultra Magnuses is "they are huge."  However, once Magnus showed up in the cartoon proper, I saw he was represented by being a Voyagerish size.  Cartoon scale won out and I got the smaller version.  Also the least expensive!  That helps!

That's why I was all about this Iron Man 3 LEGO set!  Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, sitting at home and doing Science in their sweet Science House.  Being domestic badasses.

I mean, sure, it comes with a helicopter with Gandalf the Black-- er, Mandarin and an "Extremis Soldier," and I guess Tony and/or Pepper are supposed to fight them, but meh.  I was in this for the house.  So I could play house.  Science House.  Imagine that helicopter is somewhere just outside the photograph, doing whatever.  Going out for donuts.  Sure.  But SCIENCE HOUSE.

I let it be known (by announcing updates to my Amazon Wish List on twitter) that this was a LEGO set I coveted, and my pals Neal and Cindy Lindsay brought it along to my birthday, for me, to have.  Because they're basically the best.  I put this effer together as soon as everyone went home.  Unfortunately, the instructions started out with that dang helicopter, but it's kind of like eating your vegetables before getting to the dessert.

There are some action gimmicks involved.  One you can see in action, sort of, in the second photograph.  If you pull on a lever made out of a Technic piece in the roof near the right-most window, the window panel is pushed out.  Similarly, there's a lever on the opposite side that pushes up the ground underneath the two-part, half-vacant Hall of Armor, catapulting your Iron Men upwards.  I am really tempted to go fill that empty space with another Iron Man armor, but I'd have to go buy a $30 Avengers set, so I'll have to think on that.

They also advertise that you can swap Pepper's head into the Iron Man armor, because, duh, awesome.  This set also continues the recent trend of painting a differently-expressioned face on the back of the mini-figure heads so you can choose which one you want.

and i guess the helicopter has missile launchers

oh hey remember a few years ago when lego was avoiding certain licenses because they didn't want to be seen as too violent

I've been quieter on the toy front these past few weeks not 'cuz I ain't gotten anything new, but because I've got some new stuff that's LEGO and that's different to talk about than Transformers stuff.  I've got a nice rhythm and/or rut with talking about Transformers stuff since I talk about it so often -- but LEGO's this entire different animal and so it's more intimidating.  (Also I'm not sure the big Batcave set I got will fit in my lighting studio, plus lifting it from the coffee table and putting it in the lighting studio is a Thing.)  I will have to get to it later.

MEANWHILE HERE'S A SIMPLE SWORD I GOT

It's not an official sword.  When we got Metalhawk last year at BotCon and he showed up in the comic, he was drawn with his original toy's sword because Metalhawks have swordses, but the toy didn't come with one.  It was just Thunderwing with a new head, after all, and so there was no sword in the tooling.  (And making a new sword means someone else doesn't get a new head, the way things are budgeted.)  But man, it'd be nice if he had a sword anyway, right?

Well, Venksta aka Renderform, the guy who made the Bumper head I talked about a while back, made one!  And so I bought it.  And now Metalhawk has a sword.

If it has a flaw, it's that it's a little heavy.  It's a solid chunk of plastic, seemingly without the gaps Hasbro puts in their stuff to save on plastic and shipping weights, so it's got some weight to it.  The only reason this would be a flaw is that it kind of upsets Metalhawk's balancing a bit and suddenly he's really topheavy on one side.  Otherwise, no probs.  It's a sharp sculpt.  There's even a second peg on the underside so you can store it in jet mode.

It completes him.   I got mine at Big Bad Toy Store!  You can buy it alone or with some original-toy-accurate rifles for BotCon Overlord.

Cheetimus and I split the Masterpiece Frenzy/Buzzsaw set, and I've mailed Frenzy to Cheetimus long ago, but I took pictures of him before I sent him off!  He said I could!  And so let's finally talk about this toy I don't have right now but will later when he comes out in the United States and I rebuy him.

I've always been a Frenzy over a Rumble guy.  The reasons for this are simple and petty: I had Frenzy's toy as a kid, not Rumble, and Frenzy featured prominently in my first comic books, not Rumble.  (I'm sure Rumble was IN them, in fact I know he was, but he was kind of colored blue in them just like Frenzy so it's not like he had a large chance of standing out.)  And the cartoon was for chumps (who got home from school earlier)!

And so I very much would like this Frenzy toy later, but just not for the $30 portion of the Japanese set he is.  My impatience has its limits, and those limits are Buzzsaw-shaped.

Plus, man, I gotta tell ya, Buzzsaw's Masterpiece toy is just so much more compelling than Frenzy/Rumble's.  Buzzsaw was always one of the better early Recordicons because he transformed out of his cassette shape into multiple directions.  He didn't remain flat like Frumble and Ravage.  His wings spread out, sure, but he also poked his legs and head out and became more 3D.  And so, visually, Frenzy just isn't as interesting to me me.  He's a thin dude.  Obviously, Masterpiece Frenzy is way more intricate than the original and makes for a much more poseable and believable humanoid robot, but he's still kinda flat.

Also, Buzzsaw's weaponry, which were previously removable accessories, are integrated into his Masterpiece transformation, which is amazing and impossible.  Buzzsaw gets to break the laws of physics, but Frenzy doesn't.  Frenzy's extra weapons are still extra parts.  It makes logical sense for this to be the case, since these guns are supposed to be able to be removed and replugged into various places, but it's still less awestriking.  The weapons can switch between two pegs, one sized for his spoolholes and the other sized for his fistholes.

And Frenzy's giant piledrivers which he has because of Frumble Mixup are obviously gonna be big extra parts you plug in.  There's also a third part that both piledrivers attach to which then in turn plugs into Frenzy's back, if you want robot mode storage.  It makes him unstandable, so I'm not sure why you would.  But hey, it's there!

So, really, there's more stuff to do with Frenzy than Buzzsaw just by considering the sheer amount of extra stuff he comes with.  But I still prefer amazingly self-contained Buzzsaw.

[gallery]

I don't post a lot of fan art on this particular site 'cuz my ad networks on here frown on lack of text and I'm already a webcomic.  But!  I got like an avalanche of Ultra Car art this past week and I thought I'd cram them all into one post all quick-like, and then maybe do a review in a day or so to cement that contextualizing info back in.  LET'S DO THIS!  (left to right, top row to bottom)

1) David McGuire (animated, have to click)

2) Also David McGuire!

3) Randy Milholland

4) Yotomoe

5) BrassyDel

6) Dottianne

7) DownrightDapperDoodles

8) Ellejohara

9) HunterLu

So anyway, I got more art of Skater Girl Ultra Car within one week than I have of any other character in Shortpacked! in all its eight years.  She might be popular.

Laserbeak?  Who the hell's Laserbeak?  A chump, that's what.  A cowardly chump.  Seriously, look up his Tech-Spec bio.  He's not only a condor, he's also ... chicken.

pause for laughter

Now, Buzzsaw, he's where it's at.  Buzzsaw will cut you.  Buzzsaw's got a kill list a mile long.  He's like Rambo, but with a razor-sharp beak.  You know that speech about velociraptors Alan Grant gives the kids in Jurassic Park?  That's Buzzsaw.  He's weaponized bird.  Don't believe me, ask Omega Supreme.  Except you can't.  Because Buzzsaw murdered him.  Murdered him and he never came back ever again.

Which is why Buzzsaw is the only Masterpiece Recordicon I sought out.  Yeah, I'll get them all later (including Buzzsaw) when they're sold as a package deal as a Toys"R"Us exclusive over here in North America, but I wanted Buzzsaw now.  At $60 for the Japanese set of him and Frenzy, that was a little cost prohibitive, but I struck a deal with Cheetimus since he wanted Frenzy but not Buzzsaw.  And so now I have my Buzzsaw.  Frenzy is already repackaged up and ready to go out the door.

Part of the reason I want him now, other than Wanting Him Now And Not Later, is that there's no guarantee the Hasbro release will be so creamy orange.  It's hard to tell from Hasbro's stock photography because it's so Photoshopped and airbrushed, but Hasbro seems to be doing a toy-color kinda theme with their version of Soundwave and the Recordicons, particularly with Soundwave's yellow eyes.  But I want that damn orange.  It matches the color of Buzzsaw in the comic.  It also matches the color of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.  Toy-accurate gold is acceptable but not perfect.  And for Buzzsaw, I want perfect.

With Masterpiece Buzzsaw, perfect is exactly what you get.  I mean, I like my Ravages and all, but Masterpiece Laserbeak/Buzzsaw's mold is insanely perfect.  Impossibly perfect.  You know how on the original Buzzsaw toy you had to plug in half his mass with those chromed wing pieces?  Yeah, well, screw that with this new version, because that stuff is all incorporated into the transformation.  Somehow this engineering marvel gets everything to extract out of the exact same sized mini-cassette shape as the original.  Masterpiece Ravage's add-on guns are also included in his transformation, but it's a much less-elegant looking tape when you're done with it.  With Laserbeak, you flip him over and he's still a flat surface back there, even if that flat surface has condor-shaped carvings through it.  Ravage... Ravage seems to be kind of a mess back there.  I mean, he looks nice enough, but he's relatively a little rough around the edges and I don't have to have him now-now.  I can wait.

But really, the best part about Buzzsaw is that he can perch.  He's not always stuck in the swooping-forward pose, nose out, head down.  You can rear him back up on his hind legs and he can just sort of hang out casually.  That's something I really really like and it doesn't happen incredibly often.   And he has a little flip-up camera on his head.  You know.  Because this toy wasn't perfect enough.

This is a toy I can imagine keeping on my shelf basically forever.  I have a few toys that hit that sweet spot for me that outlive their usual desk life, and I'm pretty sure Buzzsaw's gonna be among them.  He hits all the right notes.  He's the Buzzsaw of my mind's eye.  When Masterpiece Soundwave and all his little duders show up later this year whenever, you buy the hell out of it.  Just for the Buzzsaw.

Or for Laserbeak, if you wanna be all mainstream about it.